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The Moral Majority, Focus on the Family, and those who subscribe to their philosophies would have a field day with this fall's Minneapolis elections. Not only are there four openly gay candidates for city council, there are gay candidates running f...

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Cannes, France--
So I'm here at the Cannes Film Festival in the sunny south of France, staring at a ridiculously dreamy ingnue named Naomi Watts doing press for the new David Lynch movie, and I'm thinking about pleasure. Le plaisir, as the F...

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Is it possible the amount of theater in the Twin Cities has finally outstripped the audience available to watch it? Wendy Knox of the Frank Theatre has been offering up dire warnings for a while now, predicting that the growing number of small inde...

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It's amazing what you'll see in the Twin Cities once the snow tide has receded and all the dormant things have come back to life for the warm months. Aside from all manner of earth-moving vehicle and orange highway obstruction, on a recent sunny Mo...

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As is their habit on the opening night of a play, the staff of the Theatre de la Jeune Lune filled the theater's lobby with trinkets and performers that evoked their play. This being Kevin Kling's meditation on Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, ...

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Rabbi Ariel Pedersen would never say the devil made her do it. But the rabbi is certain that something mystical happened one Friday afternoon in early October, as she was driving to her modest farmhouse in North Branch, 40 miles north of the Twin C...

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On a Thursday morning in April, after waiting a couple of weeks for a day that promised neither rain nor wind, a cadre of people dressed in soot-smeared yellow shirts marched onto the grounds of State Farm Insurance's corporate campus in Woodbury. ...

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A few years ago, David Wesley and his wife Bernadette were sitting around on a Saturday night when they decided it might be cool to do a radio broadcast. The couple went down into their basement recording studio, and, without any particular plan, beg...

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Before 1991 Ahmed Mohamed saw the future stretched out before him. A former Arabic teacher, he had recently started a carpentry business with his brother. Times were good. Then civil war broke out in his native Somalia and things fell apart. "The g...

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At last count, on any given night in Minneapolis more than 500 people sleep outside. And while a few are on the streets by choice, most are out there because area shelters are desperately overcrowded. So when Patrick Wood, coordinator of the Metrop...

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There is a parody of The Blair Witch Project that shows up occasionally on public-access television in which an unseen cameraman walks through his own apartment, flinging open closets and tugging on his refrigerator door, crying out in mock terror ...

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I WAS THREE years old when my father shipped out to Japan during World War II. The smoky radio voice of pop singer Jo Stafford crooning, "Those far away places with the strange-sounding names are calling, calling me" is forever linked in my memory ...

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It's hard to think of a contemporary American novelist who cares about the fate of his country as much as the Congolese author Emmanuel Dongala seems to care about his. In most American fiction, politics is little more than a backdrop for character...

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The International Bazaar, located on a busy corner on Lake Street a block east of Interstate 35W, hides a dirty little secret in its basement. Outwardly, the complex of twin two-story brown-brick buildings is fairly unexceptional. Decorated with a sm...

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The official endorsement of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party has lost its luster, especially in St. Paul mayoral politics. Losers now routinely ignore the verdict of the party faithful, which comes down at the DFL convention in June, and proceed ...

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Paul WonSavage's smile is as broad as his expansive hand gestures as he spreads his map of a northeast Minneapolis salvage yard out on a table. "This space is so beautiful," he says, in a giddy rush of words. "It's a golden opportunity."
WonSavag...

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This past Saturday a tour bus pulled up to the Theatre Garage. While tour busses are common enough sights parked in front of the Ordway and the Historic State Theatre, they are unexpected at the Garage. There is a tour-bus theater audience, with a ...

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TO LOOK AT Tim Miller you wouldn't think he's been a thorn in the side of three consecutive presidential administrations. At 42 years old, he's a handsome, all-American guy who just wants to perform, teach, and enjoy life with his partner of seven ...

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Cuban immigrant Alef Valds has been working at Hennepin County Medical Center since August, interpreting Spanish between medical staff and patients. "It's absolutely essential," says Valds of his work. "If you can't understand what the doctor's t...

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The tabletop is already covered with drawings of Minneapolis's Fifth Ward on which Natalie Johnson Lee has scribbled all kinds of notes and statistics detailing who votes and in what precinct. But she hurries out to her car to get "the really big m...